A call for vigilance at home

In “Illiberalism rampant” this past Saturday, I noted the Weekly Standard article by Universtiy of Virginia Professor Gerard Alexander: “Illiberal Europe.” I noted last week’s episode of “South Park” on the effects of the cartoon jihad in the United States and said I would seek to elicit Professor Alexander’s comments. Professor Alexander writes:

I had one main reaction to the “South Park” episode. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s call for a robust defense of free speech will fall on some deaf ears, because that value is already quite compromised in the West. America is the most democratic by far; way too many Europeans are happy to ban speech that offends them — the point of my Weekly Standard piece. What’s wrong with Europe’s speech laws is not so much that they offer radical Muslims a model of intolerance (as if they needed role models) but that it reveals that many Europeans actually share the radicals’ instinct for intolerance. We know that some progressives in America share it, too: when they’re in the majority — on campuses — they craft speech codes unless someone stops them. We have to be vigilant abroad; but we also have to be vigilant at home…